The end has begun.
What They Say:
“The Other Side of the Sea”
As Marley battles the Mid-East Alliance to end a four-year war, a group of Warrior candidates on the front lines compete to be the successor of the Armored Titan.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Last year, Attack on Titan shattered all expectations with a season (or latter half of a season, technically) that absolutely blew every other piece of the series out of the water. It featured some of the greatest episodes of any anime and I’d even argue some were among the greatest of television in general. When that season concluded with the announcement that the final season of the series would air in the following year, anticipation couldn’t be higher.
Those paying attention to news, though, couldn’t help but face some reservations given the earlier revelation that Attack on Titan’s veteran Wit Studio would not be working on the series after that now-legendary season. A change in studio was likely to bring with it some changes in the main staff, and even if the series was handed over to the best in the business, this team had established the blueprint for what defines the Attack on Titan anime, executed upon it consistently for nearly 60 episodes, and perfected it for that masterful chunk of episodes last year. To invoke the adage of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” shaking up the team that had delivered such an ideal adaptation of this material just before its final installment inevitably carried more risk than any payoff was likely to be worth. It’s hard for a new team to keep a production as consistent as it had been up to now, and with such an iconic signature style, that consistency is more important than the potential for a marginal bump in quality at this point.
Earlier this year, the new studio was announced to be MAPPA, and the staff overhaul was even more substantial than expected, with changes that shouldn’t be necessary if it was simply a matter of a different studio taking over. We’ll likely never be privy to all of the factors that contributed to these changes, but the accepted PR answer that has been offered so far mainly deals with wanting a larger studio to handle the scale of the final season. Indeed, MAPPA has a significantly higher employee count than Wit Studio, but the former has its resources spread across more projects at any given time than the latter. Although this doesn’t necessarily correlate exactly to production overlap, MAPPA currently has three TV series airing, and one of them (the especially lavish production of Jujutsu Kaisen) will follow Attack on Titan through the next cour. While the quality of that series has been a promising showcase for MAPPA, its timing also elicits some concern that Attack on Titan may not always have the finest people at the studio focused on it.
On the other hand, Wit has been more focused on a single project at a time, and from the studio’s founding, they always made Attack on Titan an obvious priority. During the first season, Production I.G had to lend a hand to its fledgling spinoff studio, and some shortcuts indicated that Wit wasn’t able to complete an episode on time, but they always ensured the big moments were as sumptuous as they needed to be, while the parts that couldn’t receive that treatment were never distractingly incompetent. They cheated at times, but in a clever enough way that the series always looked professional and polished, and required a viewer to be looking for the corners that were cut.
Given Wit’s size and tendency to focus on a single project, another factor may have been the studio’s desire to break away from the commitment to dedicating so much of their time to Attack on Titan year after year, especially with ambitious original productions like this year’s two-cour Great Pretender. It just would’ve been nice for them to stay on board for this one last season before being done with the series once and for all. But again, there were probably enough reasons that no one thing could’ve changed to keep everything as it was, especially given how many people were swapped out.
Studios like these that work with many freelancers aren’t necessarily as important as the individuals in key areas of the production. Of course the director is the head of any production, and Tetsurou Araki’s influence on the cinematic identity of the Attack on Titan anime was far more profound than is typically the case for directors adapting a manga series into a TV anime. To call Araki an auteur may be an overstatement, but throughout his filmography, one would be hard-pressed to find an argument that his directorial voice was ever passive, even when it had every opportunity to be. Death Note was the rare shounen manga that was gripping purely for its writing while mostly lacking in action, but Araki ensured that it leapt off the screen regardless. Bringing that unmatched flair for the exhilarating to something with the inherent energy of Attack on Titan was a match made in heaven, and that’s exactly why my blood starts rushing when I so much as think about any number of scenes from the series. Of course, it’s also true that Araki backed from the standard series director chair to guide relative newcomer Masashi Koizuka from the role of a chief director, but that relationship has managed to maintain Araki’s uncompromising vision while developing Koizuka into his worthy successor.
Wiping that slate clean, then, is the most worrying change. The roles of chief director and series director have been maintained, with Hajime no Ippo veteran Jun Shishido taking Araki’s spot for the former and MAPPA regular Yuuichirou Hayashi taking Koizuka’s spot for the latter. Both are competent individuals, Shishido especially, and Hayashi’s time at the studio bodes well for his familiarity with many of those he’ll be working with. But not just anyone can be Tetsurou Araki. Koizuka has done well to bridge that gap from working so closely with him throughout the years, but even then, Araki himself never stepped away from the series for a moment. To disregard his style would be akin to a soft reboot of the adaptation, and all indications are that nobody has any interest in such a prospect.
There’s no obvious reason for Yasuko Kobayashi to exit the role of series composition, but neither is there any cause for concern with Hiroshi Seko stepping up. Even without being in that position, he has been writing episode scripts of Attack on Titan since the series began, having amassed a higher count than anyone else, including not only the majority of the latest batch of episodes but the absolute best among them. Additionally, he’s served in the series composition role for series like Mob Psycho 100 (both seasons) and Vinland Saga, for which he also wrote most episodes of the former and all episodes of the latter, so he’s one of the best adaptive writers you could hope for.
Hiroyuki Sawano is nearly as iconic a composer as Araki is a director, arguably as much or more. Of the main staff positions, he’s one of the only to stay put, but Kohta Yamamoto is joining him for this season. However, Yamamoto’s anime career has almost exclusively been co-composing scores with Sawano, and those scores all tend to feel pretty consistently like pure Sawano scores. Given this, Yamamoto seems to be a pretty clear protégé who helps Sawano to work on a greater number of projects without having to compose every piece himself. The Sawano style is in high demand, especially on big projects, so it’s not surprising that this system has been developed.
This episode doesn’t always sound as unmistakably Hiroyuki Sawano as some of the core Attack on Titan compositions, but it still carries the sweeping scope of his work. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been entirely necessary for Sawano to compose many completely original pieces for this season. There’s a large library of his Attack on Titan work to draw from at this point, and many recent additions to the score have already been comprised of new arrangements of earlier compositions.
Tomohiro Kishi’s character designs are perhaps the most obvious nod to the work of this team’s predecessors, as many aspects of Kyouji Asano’s distinctive designs are maintained. It helps that we’ve seen mostly new characters so far, and all of our familiar faces have aged several years anyway, so we don’t have to worry about characters looking different when they shouldn’t, but the line work is so unmistakably Attack on Titan that it’s clear efforts are being made for consistency despite so little of the staff remaining in the same capacity.
There are so many animators on any given series that they aren’t often singled out as core components to a production, but Arifumi Imai was unquestionably essential to translating Araki’s vision of kinetic action to the key animation level to an extent that defined Attack on Titan’s visual language at least as much as anyone else. Along with animating all of the best cuts throughout the series, he was also its action animation director, a title I hadn’t seen before him. That Spider-Man-like maneuvering will be absolutely crucial when our regular characters join the fray, so Imai’s absence is another one that will have to be flat-out copied for this season to be an effective continuation and conclusion.
It was appropriate that the announcement of this new team came the day after Dorohedoro debuted on Netflix in the United States, because it happened to be almost the exact same team behind that series. This included the studio, director, writer, and character designer. The only exception is the composer, which was the one bit of consistency this season got from its predecessors.
Had that announcement not come alongside a trailer packed with two minutes of action, this might’ve been a major red flag, because Dorohedoro’s aesthetic is not one many fans would welcome for Attack on Titan. That series infuses CG into nearly everything, and while it works better in that case than expected (I still consider it largely detrimental), the same would not be true for Attack on Titan given the precedent set by all of its prior seasons. That trailer eliminated any cause for that concern, as it stuck much more closely to Wit’s established aesthetic, although it was later revealed that the trailer was directed not by Hayashi but by Shuuhei Yabuta, director of Wit’s own Vinland Saga and, ironically enough, the long-time CG director and producer of Attack on Titan, and his continued supervision on the CG production in this season is another rare piece of relative consistency.
This season premiere thankfully confirms that this season will look a lot more like Attack on Titan than Dorohedoro, but it doesn’t come without its changes, and that does include more CG work than we’re used to from the series. This is mostly limited to mechanical objects, a relatively acceptable platform for CG, and Titans, particularly those among the intelligent Nine Titans. Normal Titans are still mostly 2D, but they also only appear for a few moments in this episode. The intelligent Titans are now always depicted using CG models, which is a somewhat jarring change, but at least they consistently employ the same kind of “2.5D” CG and compositing as in Dorohedoro, so they blend in with their environment well enough, even if I preferred the hand-drawn style from Wit’s tenure. When the Colossal Titan was switched to CG in the second season in light of his greater range of motion, I was appalled, but it ended up working well enough to not detract from the classic Colossal’s final episode, “Hero,” being the magnum opus of the series (so far). These look better than that.
In general, the richness of Wit’s color palette and those signature thick outlines are all somewhat diminished here, which is unfortunate but similarly trivial in the grand scheme. It was simply never going to look exactly the same without the same people working on it, so the fact that it still looks good, and is still dramatic and intense, is enough of a relief.
As alluded to previously, this episode is already such a departure in content that, if we had to have a team overhaul, now was the time to do it. It already feels like a different show. None of the main characters are present yet and may not be in the next episode either, with only a few antagonists showing up, an additional three years have passed in-story in addition to the one from Wit’s final episode last year, and we’re in the new setting of Marley. We had seen Marley in Grisha’s extended flashback last season, but this new cast of characters brings a new perspective both in the fact that they fight for the antagonists and that we’re treated to warfare that we haven’t seen in the series before. Sure, Titans show up eventually, but until then, it’s a pretty straightforward depiction of twentieth century European warfare. In Paradis, the technology was significantly regressed, and with mindless Titans usually on one side, we didn’t see the familiar human constructs of war that we see here. So it doesn’t exactly feel like Attack on Titan yet, but it probably shouldn’t. The real tests will come when we shift focus back to our usual protagonists, but even then, the setting and timeframe will be different than we’re used to.
It’s an interesting way to start the season regardless of the personnel and aesthetic changes. If I’m not mistaken, there are three years unaccounted for, which is surprising given the way the previous season ended with seemingly few remaining barriers to the Scout Regiment’s journey to Marley. This is a series built on mysteries, so adding some new ones after having answered most of the long-outstanding questions is understandable, but it certainly wasn’t what I expected. The episode’s title of “The Other Side of the Ocean” clearly mimics its predecessor “The Other Side of the Wall,” but it’s a likely deliberate red herring as it simply takes the viewer to that other side rather than the characters with which we shared that journey. They haven’t made it across the ocean yet as far as we can tell, so instead we find ourselves in the trenches with fellow Eldians eager to become Warriors like Reiner.
Reiner is the most prominent returning character in this episode, alongside Zeke and the unidentified Cart Titan. The Eldians kids we see fighting in the war are presented as entirely sympathetic and charming despite their allegiance; their perspective has some legitimacy given their inability to truly combat their oppressors, and enough brainwashing and indoctrination will inevitably result in these attitudes. Reiner may have been like them once, but as he’s grown and experienced the horrors he’s brought to Paradis and fought alongside their victims, he’s become the story’s most conflicted character, even to the point of disassociated personalities. Zeke is much harder to find empathy for. As they fight for their nation against a side we have no investment in, Reiner is sick of walls and Zeke is sick of war. Out of context, they seem to be likable enough characters, and that’s clearly intentional. The revelations of all that’s come before have brought many moral conflicts to some level of acceptance. Now it’s time to give our unquestionable villains their humanity, and it looks like we’ll have a bit more time to explore that.
When this season was announced, it was planned for Fall 2020, which most assumed meant October. A delay was expected given the pandemic, but its December premiere is technically still fall, and with 16 episodes scheduled, the timing is just right to fill out the next cour before Kingdom takes back the timeslot following its year-long delay. While that length is unusual in itself, though, it also seems entirely too short to finish the manga, which itself isn’t even complete yet. It still has a few months to wrap up alongside the anime like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood did, but to keep anywhere close to the same pace of adaptation as previous seasons, there needs to be at least another cour. Given these factors, it’s likely that the “final season” will be split up as “Season 3” was, perhaps with only three months in between but possibly as much as a year. Hopefully we’ll get some kind of confirmation soon, but the most important thing is that the series reach its intended conclusion without compromise and feel as close as possible to the level of quality that we’ve come to expect.
In Summary:
After a masterful previous half-season, the final season of Attack on Titan comes with colossal anticipation and equal trepidation due to its new studio and staff. This new team does their best to offer a strong facsimile of the classic Wit Studio crew’s style, and so far it’s working. The series comes back in such a different environment that the changes feel appropriate, but they may be less welcome once we’re back with more familiar faces. No matter how all the specifics play out, this episode delivers the same arresting intensity that we expect to captivate us through Attack on Titan.
Grade: A
Streamed By: Crunchyroll, Funimation, VRV, Hulu
